We interviewed Andres to discuss the global whale hunting controversy and how coastal countries can profit from whale watching in this video.

We further discussed with Andres the importance of whales in the ecosystem in this podcast.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Whale watching is more than sitting on a boat and viewing just whales. It is going out into the natural environment of whales and viewing all the marine species who share the water with the whales. It has significant educational and environmental benefits and provides an outlet to study the whales scientifically. There are also economic benefits both locally and globally. Whale watching has the potential to expand the tourism market, which will promote all the local businesses and restaurants. Jobs are created when locals are trained as guides. They can combine local knowledge such as traditional encounters with the whales with scientific knowledge about the whales.

Whale watching as an alternative to whaling is an idea being promoted around the world. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) wrote up a global proposal for whale watching as a sustainable alternative. They estimated that the whale watching industry profited 1-billion dollars in 2001. Recent findings by Andres Cisneros from the University of B.C. found that whale watching could potentially profit 2.5 billion dollars worldwide. His model estimates the value of whale watching could be worth double the amount compared to 10 years ago if countries begin to expand their whale watching industry.

Regulations are being put in place to make sure whales and their environment are respected. The IFAW is one of the main groups who promotes responsible whale watching. Responsible whale watching is a global code of conduct for how whales should be treated. This is to prevent the harassment of the whales and reduce intrusions into their environment by the whale watching boats. There are concerns that a large number of boats and people may disturb whale migration and feeding habits.
There is also a need to change some of the tourism laws to allow local fishermen to act as whale watching guides.This will provide more work and give them an opportunity to expand their employment beyond just fishing. This problem was brought to Andres’ attention on a recent trip to Panama. “I was just down talking to fishermen in Panama and they were saying ‘sometimes the fishing is not very good and we know that there are whales out there and we would like to maybe ask the tourists if they want to pay us and we would take them to where we know there are whales’ and they are not letting them do that right now because of some tourism laws that they have down there.”

Whale watching is a way to use whales as a sustainable resource. It provides jobs and reduces the harm done to whales and their environment. Some countries are realizing the potential profit that whale watching can but many more can join in and stop commercial whaling. There needs to be regulation on this growing whale watching industry to make sure it is practiced ethically.

The UK company Sea Life Surveys has a video on how they run their responsible whale watching trips.

This article is targeted for a more general audience is one of the best write ups I found. There is little jargon and the main results/ story are really clearly presented. It also stays true to the original research. Most of all I love the unique spin the author (Elizabeth Pennisi) put into the story with the Michael Phelps analogy.

The CBC’s coverage of the story is equally true to the research though I found the story they told to be less engaging than the Science news article. The CBC story is actually very similar to the UBC media release.

The CBC also featured the story on their radio show Quirks and Quarks (April 2, 2011).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Eliason was interveiwed for the show and overall did pretty well at sounding interesting and not using jargon. Bob Macdonald (the host) did a good job of getting her to better describe the ‘leads’ she used to measure the heartrate of the fish.

Sockeye salmon in the Fraser River are facing such critically warm water in the summer that populations will either have to adapt or die as climate change pushes temperatures even higher, according to new research at the University of British Columbia.

The globe and mail definitely presents a different main message than the other media. It seems the writer did not fully understand the results of the research or perhaps went too far trying to generalize the results and make a bigger story out of them.

I thought it was interesting that the CBC Quirks and Quarks coverage provided links to the original paper and the Globe and Mail provides links to the popular science article.

This is probably an indication of where the reporters got their information, the differences in their stories.

Eliason’s paper is about how some Salmon are better suited to climate change, their hearts allow them to survive in warmer water where other species would have difficulty.

Here is a short clip of what Esophageal cancer is and its causes and symptoms.

Yesterday i came across a couple articles from Medindia, Time, The wall street

straberries @ flickr

journal and WebMD, that talked about strawberries having a potential to prevent esophageal cancer based on a preliminary research by Tong Chen. (a cancer researcher at Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Center).

Based on the results from her animal study showing that strawberries had anti-cancer effects, Chen decided to study strawberries as a cancer preventive in humans. Her study involved a total of 38 participants all from China who were about 55 years old suffering from a mild to moderate dysplasia in the esophagus. 36 participants completed the study and biopsies of the esophagus were taken before and after the study.

These participants were instructed to consume 30 grams of freeze-dried strawberries (powder) in a glass of water twice daily for six months. Out of the 36 participants, 29 of them showed a decreased level of precancerous lesions.

So, Strawberries may be an alternative to prevent esophageal cancer. But this does not mean that we could gulp down pounds and pounds of strawberries to prevent or fight cancer. This research is still at its preliminary stage. There is more research and scrutiny that needs to be done for these findings to be valid.

When someone brings up the idea that life as we know it originated from space, it is easy to think they are crazy. However, instead of thinking of lanky-green aliens, would this idea seem so far fetched if they were talking about micro-organisms? There is a hypothesis called panspermia which hypothesizes that life originated elsewhere in space and migrated to Earth. This alien life would have arrived from another planet on a meteorite.

Comet Hale-Bopp courtesy kevindooley Flickr

There are three important stages a micro-organism would have to survive for a succussful journey. Must first survive take off, then space travel and finally survive the impact upon landing. There have been studies to evaluate the likelihood of surviving any of these phases.
Gerda Horneck from the German Aerospace Center stated in a paper which evaluated spore survival during space travel that, “There are certain areas at the rim of the impact crater, called the spallation zone, where by reflection of the shock wave the temperatures do not exceed 100 degrees Celsius.” This means that it’s cool enough for some spores to survive ejection from a planet.Rocco Mancinelli of the SETI Institute with his colleagues have published a review on bacteria surviving space journey. Their study supports that microbes could survive a trip through space. Micro-organisms hitching a ride on a meteorite can get protection from the dangerous UV radiation if they are below the surface.
A study published in 2001 explored the likelihood of bacterial spores surviving the landing impact. This study found that spores could survive impact scenarios that are similar to those that meteorites experience.

Micro-organism arriving from Mars seems the most likely since it is a relatively short journey. First it must be proven that there is or was life on Mars, a group of researchers from MIT are hoping to test Mars’ surface for microbes. If microbes are found, the next step would be to do DNA/RNA sequencing on them. With these tests we may be able to prove that our neighbouring planet may actually be our mother planet.

There is no definite answer to how life as we know it began on Earth. I found this research interesting because I never heard of this idea before. After looking at the papers concerning bacteria surviving space travel, I don’t think this idea is far fetched. I think it is a rather simple explanation to how Earth became inhabited. If Martian microbes could be sequenced and a connection was found between them and any organisms genome here on Earth, that would be incredible. I think it would be hard for many people to accept this idea because it makes our origins even more mysterious.

In search of unusual genes, researchers found new DNA sequences in the GOS data set that were not present in known organisms or viruses. Currently, the tree of life has three major branches or divisions: bacteria, eukarya, and archaea. These sequences formed groups that branched outside of known divisions in the tree of life. Researchers proposed that the new groups, or lineages, emerged from four possibilities. The two most likely explanations are that the lineages are from unknown viruses or a fourth major branch on the tree of life. Dr. Jonathan Eisen, from U.C. Davis and one of the paper’s authors, believes the former is more probable.

Interestingly, Dr. Eisen and his colleagues decided to forgo a formal university press release for their paper. Instead, Dr. Eisen wrote his own ‘press release’ on his blog, The Tree of Life. He feared that the results of the paper would become overstated in the press, through communication, or even in his own blog post.

Newsy.com video coverage of the research:

The research was able to make waves in the media and the Telegraph in the UK published an article online with the sexy headline, “Scientist finds a whole new ‘domain’ of life”. Richard Alleyne, the author of the news article, may not have written the headline, but the body of the article did contain inaccuracies. For example, Alleyne had written that the technique used to analyze the DNA was named by the researchers themselves, which was not the case. This was actually the first time the technique was used on a large scale basis.

Dr. Eisen was quick to respond to the misleading headline and inaccuracies within the news article. In the article’s comments section, he noted three of the main errors and provided corrections. Dr. Eisen clarified that a new domain of life is only one of the possible explanations for the findings and not a conclusive result. There have not been any corrections made to the news article yet, but I am curious to see how this will play out!

oThe Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition is a venture by scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute to analyze the DNA of microbes across the oceans. In fact, one data collection voyage involved navigating the oceans for over two years! The expeditions have produced an immense dataset of DNA sequences.